Citrus Canker Issue Still On The Agenda Court Faces Several Tough Decisions This Year

Florida Forecast '90 Outlook Supreme Court

March 4, 1990|By Donna O'Neal, Sentinel Tallahassee Bureau

TALLAHASSEE — If Florida's Supreme Court justices hoped their 1988 decision ordering the state to compensate citrus growers for burned trees would settle the canker-eradication controversy, they were out of luck.

Nursery owners and the state once again are taking their fight over millions of dollars worth of destroyed trees to the state's highest court.

Business lobbyists cite the canker issue as probably the most significant decision affecting Florida businesses that the court will hand down this year. They say fewer business issues reach the high court nowadays because more of its time is tied up with death-penalty appeals and lawyer-discipline cases.

Growers are challenging the constitutionality of a law passed last year that sought to end the mounting court cases against the state. There are 76 lawsuits pending in Florida courtrooms as a result of the 1984 canker-eradication project.

The 1989 law set up a $30 million settlement pool to pay property owners for healthy trees that were burned during the canker scare. The state already has made about $16 million in partial payments.

But nursery and grove owners argue that their trees were worth much more. They also contend that they have a constitutional right to seek a court judgment rather than accept the administrative settlements authorized under the new law.

The court has already sided once with the growers. In 1988, the justices ruled that the state must compensate, at full market value, the owners of 22 million citrus trees destroyed during the eradication program. That could cost the state as much as $250 million, depending on how the court defines the full market value of the trees.

Nursery owners contend that full payment should be the value of the trees when they were ready to sell to growers, which would have been months after they were burned. State officials argue that the value should be set at the time the trees were destroyed, which would result in a smaller payment to the owners.

Oral arguments in the case were delivered in December, and the court is expected to rule this spring. Lawmakers would have another crack at the canker issue during the legislative session if the court overturned the law.

Agriculture officials burned almost 20 million trees in 1984 and 1985 before concluding that the leaf-spotting canker disease in the tree nurseries was not as dangerous as first feared and would not spread to the state's $1 billion fruit crop.

Another important case that could affect the hiring practices of Florida businesses is slowly working its way through the appeals system courts and could reach the Supreme Court this year.

The case involves a woman who is suing a Tallahassee furniture store for negligence in hiring a delivery man who later returned to her home and assaulted her. The man had a history of psychiatric problems and an arrest record, but the store never did a background check before hiring him.

A jury awarded the woman about $1.5 million in damages. Six business groups have joined the furniture store in appealing the case. They argue that the ruling imposes a costly and unreasonable burden on employers in hiring workers.

''The scariest thing is, if this case is lost on appeal, it's going to set an extremely tough precedent for employers by giving them tremendous responsibility for virtually around-the-clock accountability of their employees,'' said Bill Herrle, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, which joined the appeal. ''It's asking employers to become mental-health experts in their hiring.''

Business groups have good reason to worry about setting precedent. In a 1989 case that also alleged negligent hiring, the court skirted the hiring issue but broadened the legal remedies available to workers who suffer sexual harassment on the job.

By ruling that Florida's workers' compensation law isn't the exclusive remedy for claims of sexual harassment on the job, the court opened the door for jury trials and unlimited punitive damages in such cases, said Thomas Harper, a Jacksonville lawyer who specializes in labor law. That could have a costly effect on employers, he said.

Employers scored a victory in another 1989 workers' compensation case, in which a worker with polio fractured her ankle on the job after her leg brace collapsed. The court ruled that the employee wasn't entitled to benefits because the injury wasn't caused by the job, the standard for compensation under current law.

While the justices sympathized with the worker, broadening the law ''would require us to overrule numerous decisions of this court and to expand the purpose of workers' compensation beyond what we believe was the intent of the Legislature,'' the justices ruled.

In another case last year, the court threw out as discriminatory a 1988 state law giving a $3.4 million tax break to a Polk County distillery. The law was pushed through the Legislature by Senate President Bob Crawford, D-Winter Haven. The ruling means that out-of-state liquor distilleries can't be forced to pay higher taxes. That could cost the state about $110 million a year in tax revenue, according to one Senate analysis.

In a decision for the manufacturer of an anti-acne drug, the court ruled that two Dade County women had adequate warning about the product's side effects and were not entitled to damages. Both women gave birth to deformed children after taking the drug Accutane.